The enduring debate between nature vs nurture: When to stop blaming your parents

There are three things my mother told me (or kept telling me) when I was young that will probably remain with me for the rest of my life:

First, not to waste food because there were starving children in Africa. I have heard that this is a common argument among mothers to make their children eat their veggies. Unfortunately, it held no water with me, as I could not even point out Africa on a map. It is so difficult for us to value what we have when we have it. Food was a given, so I could not visualise what it would be like without it.

Second, she told me that at the end of your life, no one will remember you for your achievements, but only for how you made them feel. As I was only starting on life, the end of it seemed like a distant finish line which, once again, I could not visualise. Still, I came to realise the wisdom of her words later.

Third, she kept harping on about how I was exactly like my father, and my brother was like her. As I grew up, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy; I turned out more or less like my father. Unfortunately, the characteristics I inherited from him are not exactly of a complimentary nature: like his penchant for overspending or his allergy to exercise. Like him, I will buy the latest model of running shoes, use them for 10 days and then let them collect dust on the shoe rack until my mother gives them to our maid, who will probably relegate them to the pile of “useless things from the employer”. I’m not afraid of thieves or trolls the way I am of the treadmill. People who love going on it baffle me, like theoretical physics or Ikea’s DIY furniture. 

But worse than my antipathy towards exercise, I’ll never forgive my father for passing down another life-threatening trait, or lack of it—our systems lack face recognition software. We cannot place people despite having seen them repeatedly at events and functions. Can you imagine the chaos this has wrought in our lives? We have thought the waiter to be a relative and hugged him with unbecoming effusiveness, and conversely, mistaken the relative for a waiter, asking for French fries that never arrived. When an aunty introduces someone to me, I’m desperately rummaging in my mind for her name. “This is my nephew’s wife’s sister,” she says. The bloodline, by now, is too thick to decode, so you give up and revert to default mode—a beatific smile that, you hope, looks informed enough to appease both the aunty and her nephew’s wife’s sister. 

But can I really attribute all my perceived character flaws to my father? J.K. Rowling once said that you can only blame your parents up to a point. At some juncture, you have to take responsibility for your life. Does that mean that there is the possibility that I could, in a hypothetical future, have an amicable relationship with my treadmill? It makes me wonder whether, if I had been raised under different circumstances, but with the same lineage, I might have developed a different personality. Would I have been different if I came from a broken home or from an impoverished family?

Apparently, research answers in the affirmative. Malcolm Gladwell, for example, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, describes how social advancement is intimately related to poverty. For those who are born poor, social advancement is difficult, not because of lesser intelligence or lack of desire, but because of a specific parenting style. He refers to a study on 12 third-grade children from different backgrounds. Parents of poor children expected the teachers to be responsible for their education. Other parents, however, honed their children’s skills through after-school activities and creative tasks. These skills helped the children develop confidence and led to social advancement. Poor children, writes Gladwell, “were characterised by ‘an emergent sense of distance, distrust and constraint’. They did not know how to ‘customise’... whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.”

This does not minimise the role of genes. Jon Entine, author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It, highlights the complex interplay of genes and culture by comparing West African runners from countries like Jamaica, who are born sprinters, with East African runners from countries like Kenya, who sweep the awards in distance running. Some say blacks are good at running because of cultural factors: they had to run back and forth to school, for example, because of their poverty. That’s why they find it difficult to break into country-club sports like golf. But this does not explain the difference in running patterns between the West and East Africans. One might need to bring in genes and heredity to complete the picture. 

“West Africans tend to have more efficient, but smaller lung capacity,” writes Entine. “Shaped by many centuries of evolution in Africa, they generally have bigger, more developed overall musculature; narrower hips, lighter calves, higher levels of plasma testosterone... and a higher percentage of fast-twitch muscles and more anaerobic enzymes, which can translate into more explosive energy.” He suggests that East African athletes from hill tribes like the Nandi assimilate oxygen in regions of low oxygen pressure and have increased levels of haemoglobin, which explains their higher endurance.

I guess this is good news for me, because it still allows me to blame my bad habits, like when I overspend, on my father. I bought the Coach bag, I tell him, because my bank balance is inextricably linked to his DNA.